The present invention relates generally to the monitoring of incoming telephone calls and selection of available telephone subscriber lines, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for detecting incoming telephone calls to a published telephone number and monitoring available customer lines, for subsequent re-assignment of a detected call, using a central office call intercept service.
It is well known in tile prior art that efficient business telephone communications requires an incoming call arrangement that uses multiple incoming telephone lines to minimize the possibility of a customer call going unanswered. At the same time, it is preferred that such an arrangement allow all incoming calls to be answered at a central location within the business using a consolidated call signaling arrangement. For many businesses, the solution has been to lease multiple incoming lines and numbers from the local telephone company, publish one incoming number, then subscribe to a "line-hunt" service. Using such a service, the phone company's central office provides a system that detects an incoming call to the published number, then "hunts" the subscriber's multiple lines and rolls the call over to one that is available to receive the call. Unfortunately, such a line-hunt service is expensive to the customer, who incurs a substantial monthly, per line, premium charge on his telephone bill.
More recently, some local telephone companies have offered an additional central office feature to businesses having a need for a line-hunt type service by wishing to avoid the corresponding expense. With this service, sometimes called "Bell Prestige Service" and offered, for example, by South Central Bell Telephone Company, all incoming calls to the subscriber are monitored at the central office. When an incoming call is detected, a single ringing or master line at the subscriber's office is activated. The phone operator at the subscriber's office visually looks for an available line, then selects that line and dials a touch tone code back to the central lo office. Upon receipt of this code, the central office system moves the incoming call off of the master line and onto to tile selected idle line.
The primary problem with this conventional Prestige idle line selection system is that it requires a constant and active human intervention at the subscriber's location, both to look for and select an idle line and to send the appropriate intercept code back to the central office. Many businesses are not in a position or do not prefer to consistently commit human resources to such a method.
What is needed, then, is a multiple telephone line apparatus and system that automatically, and without human intervention, routes all incoming calls made to a published telephone line to an available incoming line, anti does so without the use of expensive central office installed and controlled hardware and systems. This device is presently lacking in the prior art.